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UGA grad got close to nature living in a tipi two years

Mark Warren, author of "Two Winters in a Tipi," talks about his experience living in a traditional native american home for two years in Athens, Ga. on Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013. (Richard Hamm/Staff) OnlineAthens / Athens Banner-Herald

Mark Warren, author of "Two Winters in a Tipi," talks about his experience living in a traditional native american home for two years in Athens, Ga. on Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013. (Richard Hamm/Staff) OnlineAthens / Athens Banner-Herald

Living in a tipi didn’t begin or change the course of Mark Warren’s journey through life. But two years sheltering under canvas and poles definitely speeded up the learning curve, Warren told a University of Georgia audience Tuesday.

Even as a child, he found refuge in the forest from trouble at home, said Warren, a tall, rangy man who graduated from UGA as a chemistry major in 1969 and now runs the Medicine Bow Wilderness School he founded near Dahlonega.

And it was partly an accident that he wound up in a tipi more than 20 years ago.

In 1989, lightning struck the North Georgia house he was living in.

The resulting fire burned everything he owned, including his piano, hundreds of musical compositions — music was his other refuge — and a novel he’d been working on for seven years.

He’s finally back at work on the novel, but in the meantime he’s just published a book about his time in the tipi, “Two Winters in a Tipi.”

The fire was devastating, but it also nudged him to fulfill his childhood dream of living in the Native American dwelling — America’s first breakdown tent, he said.

Like many his age, Warren grew up watching Western movies, explained Warren, who gave up a place in medical school to follow a career as a naturalist and educator.

“There was something larger I need to pursue for myself,” he said. “Getting to know the facts of nature and how the bigger cycles work was just thrilling to me.”

Along the way, he learned some Cherokee survival skills; he can keep himself in food and shelter out in the wild, even without a survival toolkit, he said.

“With North American Indian survival, your resources are simply out in nature. You’re never going to run out,” Warren told the small group gathered to hear him in UGA’s Miller Learning Center.

Warren was into nature long before the fire, but living in the tipi changed the way he connected with the forest and its creatures, he said.

“You’re never really separated from your environment,” he said.

One night, he heard a mysterious sound.

“I heard a 9-year-old girl being strangled by a big brutish man,” he said.

There really was no girl or man, as Warren discovered when he went out to look. But he didn’t find out what was making the little-girl sound until years later, when he had learned to be a good tracker. It was the mating call of the gray fox, he discovered late one night when he silently stalked the sound until he found the fox.

Once, Warren tracked a small deer herd — stalking, he called it — and then ran with them.

“The constant edge of awareness on which they lived was palpable. These days I don’t sleep so close to that edge of possibility,” he said.

With nothing to light up the night inside the tipi, Warren had to get all his cooking and other chores, like gathering firewood, done during daylight hours. But instead of becoming rushed, Warren found a new, more relaxed pace of life, he said.

Warren couldn’t live in a tipi again, he said. Back problems have come with time, and he couldn’t sleep on the earthen floor.